Digital Advertisements and Non-Fare Revenue push By Indian Railways to emerge a new savior for Indian Railways

NEW DELHI: It seems that monetization is Indian Railways’ biggest mission as of now, and they are leaving no stone unturned to pump up more revenues, from every possible inch of their procession.

As per reports coming in, Indian Railways is creating a massive Rail Display Network (RDN), which has been hailed as the largest advertisement platform outside television.

Armed with over 2 lakh digital screens, which would be installed across 2175 railway stations, Indian Railways is planning to generate Rs 10,000 crore of advertisement revenue from digital advertisements.

If executed, then this would be the largest non-fare revenue model for Indian Railways, till date.

Indian Railways have been incurring huge losses in their passenger operations segments, since ages. While Rs 33,491 crore was lost in maintaining passenger operations in 2014-15, Rs 35,918 crore was lost in 2015-16.

Due to this reason, Railways have been pushing for non-fare revenues since last few months, and in this endeavour, digital advertisements seem to be the most powerful one.

As per incoming reports, their Rail Display Network will install more than 2 lakh digital screens across 2000+ railway stations, wherein live tracking of trains would be enabled, and alongside, advertisements would be showcased to generate revenues.

Companies like Google, Microsoft and jio have already shown interest in this massive advertisement platform, through which Railways plan to churn out Rs 10,000 crore revenues in 10 years.

While such digital advertisements are already running as a pilot project in railway stations of Old Delhi, Gorakhpur, Gwalior and Varanasi, Indian Rail will soon allocate tenders for 400 A-category railway stations, starting from May.

Technologically powered by RailTel, these digital display screens would be ‘cloud controlled’ so that every frame of the advertisement is controlled via one central hub.

Earlier, in order to increase non-fare revenues, Indian Railways had introduced a series of plans and schemes.

For example, soon, trains such as Paytm Express and Savlon Mail would be running, as Indian Rail plans to run sponsored trains, with their outer and inner surface available for vinyl based advertisement sheets.

Besides, railway stations would be soon offered to host weddings, private parties and events, and even private companies would be roped in to manage railway stations, and generate revenues.

ATMs would be soon installed at railway stations, to generate even more revenues.

Earlier, reports had come in that IRCTC will monetize terabytes of user-data, which they have accumulated, to launch geo-specific targeted advertisements for increasing their revenues.

We will keep you updated as we receive more information regarding Indian Railways’ new plans for generating non-fare revenues.